You are a playwright writing a satire on the Tory party’s relationship with money, timed to be staged for the enjoyment of leftish audiences just before the general election. Provisionally entitling your work The Rich List, you think it will make a darkly amusing opening to set the first act at a “black-and-white ball”, the lavish fundraisers that the Tories throw to swell their campaign coffers with cheques from the doshed-up.

You set the scene at one of the swankiest hotels off London’s Park Lane. You populate the stage with more bankers, hedge funders, currency speculators, property developers and other representatives of the super-rich than you can hide in a secret Swiss bank account. Getting into your satirical stride, you include among the guest list a pornographer, a man who made his fortune from lap dancers and the boss of a City brokerage that was fined for its involvement in the Libor interest-rate fixing scandal.

Having done your research, you know that the centrepiece of the ball is an auction. Dreaming up items to put under the hammer that might best caricature the Tories as a party for the filthy rich, you include a trip on a private jet to the Greek island of Santorini, the use of a luxury 12-bed chalet in Verbier and a pheasant and partridge shoot (maximum kill 500). Maybe that last one is hamming it up a bit, but this is satire, after all. Tories shooting pheasants is so wonderfully at odds with their rhetoric about us all being in it together that the scene is guaranteed to raise a bitter laugh from the audience.

You’ll have senior members of the government mingling with the moguls and, to make the Tory party look truly tawdry, you’ll want to whore some of the party’s leading personalities out to the plutocrats by putting ministers up for sale. So among the things going under the hammer, you’ll include a shoe-shopping trip with Theresa May (£500 voucher included!), a 10-kilometre “Iron Man” cross-country marathon with Iain Duncan Smith (a test of anyone’s endurance), a collection of budgets signed by George Osborne (a handy reminder of all the tax breaks he’s given to the have-yachts) and (for the really desperate) an early breakfast and jog with Nicky Morgan.

By now, our playwright is feeling pretty pleased with how it is coming together. But on reflection, he thinks he has overdone it. He takes out the porn merchant and his lurid red Rolls-Royce. Surely even the Tory party would see how ghastly that looks? And he deletes the scene in which the home secretary is rented out as a personal shopper. Surely even the Tory party would refrain from demeaning its most senior woman like that? Out too goes the scene in which a Tory peer the playwright has called Lord Stink tells a newspaper interviewer: “Tax avoidance, everyone does it.” Even if his ilk think like that, they would surely not be quite so brazen as to say so out loud.

As you will know, my imaginary playwright ought to have been paying more attention to the news. Because the self-satirists who run the Tory party have already staged that grotesque and performed it at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Mayfair – with the only difference that they actually included the prince of porn and auctioning off the home secretary. They have also given us the marvellous Lord Fink, the Tory donor and former Treasurer who first threatened to sue Ed Miliband when the Labour leader attacked him in the Commons, then retreated by saying that he couldn’t really complain about being called a tax-avoider because he was one.

What on earth possesses the Conservatives to behave like this? Voters will always regard the Tories as the party of money. We know Tories love loot. We know that loot loves the Tories. That can be an electoral advantage to the Conservatives when it translates into a voter perception that they are cleverer at money than Labour and better equipped to run the nation’s finances. But being the party of money flips from being a Tory advantage into a Tory liability when they are seen as the champions and cronies of rootless, unpatriotic tycoons who occupy the highest stratospheres of wealth.

The biggest obstacle to David Cameron securing another term in Number 10 is distrust of him and his party’s motives. And if there is one single thing that makes people distrustful of him and the Tories it is the belief that they are a party of the privileged who govern only in the interests of the privileged. Poll after poll attests to David Cameron’s failure to give his party the detox he once promised. The Tories are still indelibly associated with self-interest, avarice and the sleazy side of capitalism.

Labour has its own problems with money, ones I’ve often written about in the past, but whatever people think about Ed Miliband, they don’t think he will be in the pocket of people with Swiss bank accounts. In a speech yesterday afternoon, the Labour leader sought to maximise the advantage he has been gifted by his opponents and prolong the furore over donors and tax scandals by saying that there is “one rule for the rich and powerful and another for everybody else”.

The other thing we know about the Tory party and money is that it really doesn’t need any more loot at the moment. It was recently revealed that they have trousered more than £12m from just eight City potentates over the course of this parliament and that the number of big financial donors to the Conservative party has doubled since David Cameron acquired the keys to Number 10. The Tory war chest is swilling over with cash. They will massively outspend all the other parties put together during the election. They have more money than they are legally allowed to spend on the campaign. Indeed, as we revealed in the Observer a few weeks ago, they have connived to lift the campaign spending cap to further exploit their advantage in financial firepower.

So how does a rational person explain the black-and-white ball? In the middle of the closest election contest for many decades, what possesses the Tories to stage an event that so vividly advertises their toxic association with the super-rich? I suppose one possible explanation is that the Tories are just idiots. John Stuart Mill did call them the stupid party. But I’m not going to put it down to that. Whatever else he might be, David Cameron is not a simpleton and he employs plenty of smart people whose job is image manipulation. A better explanation might be that senior Tories, like the people who go to their fund-raisers, just don’t know the meaning of enough. Even when they’ve gorged on the chocolate box, they can’t resist stuffing another cash cluster into their mouths. That gets us a bit closer to the mark, but it is still not the whole explanation.

Arrogance is the Tories’ historical psychological deformation as a party. That, it seems to me, is the best explanation for why they behave like this. It is not that they are blind. They are aware that it is not a bright idea to demonstrate so plainly how remote they are from the lives lived by most of the people whose votes they seek. They vainly tried to keep their high-rollers’ ball clandestine by leaving it off their website. They banned journalists from attending. The prime minister was delivered to his fund-raiser in a vehicle with tinted windows while other guests were smuggled in by the back door, as if the event at the Grosvenor were a convention of mafia dons.

The Tories know it looks bad. Yet even conscious that it sends out all the wrong messages about what their party stands for and whose side it is on, they went ahead and did it anyway.

Arrogance would also explain Lord Fink. I don’t know the man. Those who are acquainted with him say that he comes from a humble background, is a nice chap and gives very generously to charity. All that may be true, but he clearly departed from the planet inhabited by most of the rest of us some time ago. Tax avoidance is legal, he said, and everyone does it. Most people can see the difference between investing in an Isa or saving for a pension and hedge fund moguls hoarding money in Geneva. I assume the Tory party will now have him bound, gagged and locked in a cupboard until 8 May.

Arrogance would also make sense of David Cameron’s decision to give a peerage and then make a minister of Stephen Green, the man who was chief executive and chairman of HSBC even though it was known at the time of his appointment to government that the bank’s Swiss subsidiary had been involved in facilitating industrial-scale tax avoidance.

To all of which, I hear Tories dismissively shrugging that it won’t make any difference because the voters don’t really care about it that much. We’ll see. If there is one thing that will lose this election for the Tories it is their arrogant assumption that they are bound to win, however they behave.